Now we’re going to talk about IDE hard drives. Now the first connector, this is called a master because it’s the first one on the cable and the second one is called a slave, slave connector. Now when we look at the hard drive we need to set this tiny pin according to what it’ll be on the cable. So let’s say you want to replace your windows hard drive, this one is the master connector, it’s the top of the cable. You want to take this tiny pin and connect it on the master spot on your hard drive and if you just want extra storage to add on to your windows hard drive you’ll connect it to the slave connector, then this pin will go on the slave spot reserved on this hard drive.

Okay so now we need to know where to connect this cable into the motherboard and when you look at the board you’ll notice this, you have a short, short little connector here this one is for floppy which will not be using, then we have this green one and the white one, these two are meant for CD ROM’s and hard drives but now you need to figure out where would the cable go. In my case we’re going to take the hard drive and replace a windows one, let’s pretend my hard drive is just absolutely crapped out so what you need to do is you look at the area on the connectors and you’re going to find a writing in this case it’s right here and it says FDD for floppy Drive, there’s IDE1 and right there you can barely see it it says IDE2 what that means is always on the IDE1 master connector is where the windows connector will go, so if your windows hard drive died, you need to replace it, you need to make sure it’s always on this IDE1 master connector, you can put the hard drives on the IDE2 as master and slave but they will work as storage.

So now remember we looked at the cable and we said that when you look at from the top you got two connectors that are really close together designated for hard drives and then you have one that is far away that is designated for the motherboard, so we take this connector that is far away and just like the hard drive you’ll notice there’s a notch, it’s keyed so there’s no way to put it on backwards so we take the connector on the cable, plug it on the board IDE1 and you’re done.